It is now commonplace for consumers (or customers or shoppers or buyers) to select goods or products to be purchased, rented or otherwise obtained from remote client-server based suppliers. For example, such suppliers may be e-commerce or Internet-based retailers or merchants, which also may be referred to as an on-line retailer. For example, on-line retailers have set up on-line Internet web sites where consumers can shop for the products (or items or goods) that are available, purchase or rent the products desired and have the products delivered to them. These products may be tangible goods, such as groceries, books, CDs, DVDs, tools, clothes, footwear, health/beauty items, hardware, or any other tangible goods that are physically delivered to the customer, or “digital” goods, such as electronic books, music, movies/videos, application software, or any other digital product that is downloaded, copied, transmitted or otherwise electronically transferred to the customer. Items could even be animals or people, such as could be used in an animal adoption context or on a social networking or dating website.
It is also known for on-line merchant websites to anticipate the customer's on-line shopping needs by providing recommended items for the customer to purchase, such as is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,317,722, entitled “Use of Electronic Shopping Carts to Generate Personal Recommendations”, issued Nov. 13, 2001, to Jacobi, et al. These recommendations can be, for example, based in part on the customer's current and historical buying habits, the customer's likes and dislikes, and other factors, and can be displayed as a list of recommended items. To review the recommendations, the customer scrolls through the recommended items list and, if a desired item is found, the customer selects (or clicks on) a desired recommended item, which causes the website to display the item details, including the product specifications, characteristics, features and/or images of the recommended item. After reviewing the item details, the customer either buys the recommended item or returns to the recommended items list to search for another recommended item to review. In addition, often the number of recommended items are many and, thus, the recommendations list is long (e.g., several web pages). As a result, to find a desired recommended item to purchase, the customer may spend a significant amount of time scrolling through the recommendations list to find the desired item. This review and selection process can be very cumbersome and inefficient, may lead to buyer frustration, and may increase the likelihood that the customer will by-pass the merchant's recommendation feature in the future, thereby leading to lower overall sales for the merchant.
Therefore, the current techniques for providing recommended items for shoppers can be inefficient, frustrating and lead to lost sales and loss of repeat business for the merchant. Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a system or method for providing recommendations for shoppers that overcomes the limitations and inefficiencies of the conventional approaches, that among other potential benefits, provides a more efficient way of displaying and/or selecting recommended items from merchants and/or makes it more convenient and efficient for the customer to purchase recommended items, thereby improving the overall shopping experience with the merchant.